A big part of me resists even writing about any legislation sponsored by Utah state Sen. Chris Buttars. The blustery West Jordan Republican is like a big bull moose with a red and white target painted on his gut. Just aim and squeeze the trigger.

His role in the Legislature is well-secured: He’s a dirty water carrier for GOP leadership. It isn’t that Buttars doesn’t believe in the complete moral correctness of the bills he floats every year. He’s passionate. And he’s just the kind of screen majority leaders need so they can play behind-closed-doors games and build their power base. Buttars consistently draws the public’s attention away from complex matters with universal and serious ramifications: vouchers vs. public education funding; tax policies; gun control on the University of Utah campus, to cite a few. His bills, many of which raise serious legal questions, tend to work their way through the system, clogging the legislative plumbing until the last day or two of the session.

Like most in the Utah press corps, I used to find Buttar’s shit-kicking, suburban cowboy image slightly amusing. But then I watched him on Friday at the Capitol, presenting his latest morality bill to the Senate Government Operations Committee.

It was classic Buttars. Like most of his message bills, this one features a big, amorphous fear (in this case, I think it’s secular humanists) which, unchecked, will destroy our way of life.

Buttars contends freedom of religion has been “cloaked” in contemporary society. Therefore, we need yet another law that permits free expression of religious views. He says the state (which I take to mean government in general, and not religion-saturated Utah) has become “hostile” to religion.

Buttars has based this bill, which redundantly offers protections already included in the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, on an anecdotal experience he claims to have had with a constituent. One parent approached him with a story that her child had been suspended from a public high school for wearing a T-shirt with the Mormon slogan “CTR” — for Choose the Right.

Two legal experts — the director of the state chapter of the ACLU and committee member Sen. Scott McCoy, who is a practicing attorney — told Buttars the teacher in that case was clearly wrong to kick the kid out. Perhaps, they both asked, it might be better to work on educating teachers, staff and administrators in the finer points of free expression before putting yet another law on the books that is sure to be litigated from here until 2020?

I was sitting on the side of the room with Deseret Morning News government reporter Lisa Riley Roche. I wanted to stand up and yell: “Hey Sen. Buttars! Have a read of the U.S. Constitution. Y’know — the SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND? It’s all in there!”

My favorite Buttars’ line came when he summarized the bill: “The mainstream religious organizations are living in fear. That fear has cloaked their [religious] freedom. They sent that kid home because he had a CTR shirt, but a kid with 26 piercings and green hair doesn’t get sued. Maybe you ought to sue him.”

Did I mention the bill passed out of committee and on to the full Senate?

Keep on toting that dirty water, Sen. Buttars.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 20th, 2007 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Politics, Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.